Tell Me Your Experiences Of Ufos, Esp, Etc.

[mwc]

 

     Parasitic worms...or aliens.

 

          mwc

[Ro-bear]

I'm glad you posted that comic, mwc.  I sometimes have the latter two of the three dream types it describes.  It is somehow comforting to know that others are similarly afflicted.  I can't control these dreams as easily as I do the naked-in-public dreams.  Sadly, once I gained control of that dream, it quit coming.  I was starting to have fun with it.

[directionless]

I decided to summarize the thread up to now. Of course, my summaries don't do the experiences justice.

 

SilentLoner:

- dream came true the next day

 

Thurisaz:

- Thor answered with lightning

- cup of dice tipped over for no reason

- absence of waves where there should have been

 

Deva:

- flaming UFO

- telephone telepathy

- apparition

 

Margee:

- 3 dreams came true

- flaming UFO

- heavenly chimes witnessed twice by two people

 

florduh:

- very close UFO encounter

- dramatic Ouija experiences

 

Burnedout:

- bigfoot reported by friend

 

Freethawt:

- green/blue orb UFO seen again 15 years later

 

Rank Stranger:

- dwarf bigfoot reported by friend

 

directionless:

- daylight disc UFO

- almost struck by lightning (God's sense of humor?)

[Voice]

 

I once had a dream that came true the next day. It was weird. 

 

I've had 3 dreams that came true. One was of my sisters death 6 months before she died. I even told her about it....... Spooky.......

 

 

This was happening to me for a few years running, and it's what got me to start doing probability calcs.  Coincidence?  Something else?  

It's not the deja vu feeling.  The deja vu feeling is something totally different.  I can recommend a harmful chemical substance that will increase feelings of deja vu if you want to experience that.  These were instances of total recall of a dream because the event happening now WAS the dream.  

[edit]

This subject raises questions like what is the nature of dream-consciousness, of consciousness, whether we're still constructing the dreams as we experience an event.

 

I estimate a high degree of probability that my mere participation in this conversation will lower my status on the sanity charts of those members taking notes on my behavior and keeping track of my insanity.  I did not see this in a dream.  I also estimate a degree of probability that I will see this post tomorrow and slap my forehead for saying anything at all.  Undiscovered/undocumented phenomenon are a bitch to try to figure out.  It's hard enough most everyone beats you down for trying.  It's harder when people qualified to help you figure it out also beat you down for it because their experience with it hasn't yet reached critical mass.

 

In trying to explain the foreshadowing dream phenomenon, I've entertained possibilities such as time dilation of the mind (which is possible but I don't know how/why it would work frequently for one person then just sometimes for some people and then never for most people).  You start getting into what is the nature of consciousness and experience when you do mental time dilation, it touches on quantum mechanics, the metaphysical with questions like what is the nature of mind and experience?  I haven't taken the idea too seriously but it's fun to think about.

The fact that most first time accounts told by people are within the trauma/death/health arena is a factor in the calcs, and something worthy of note.

 

One time I was with a group of 4 or 5 people hanging out after work, and I realized I'd seen it already in a dream a couple years ago.  What was to happen next was creepy, dark, disturbing (even though the situation didn't seem like it), so I immediately left.  I never took the dream as any kind of warning or anything like that, the experiences were never like that for me.  Except for this one instance my foreshadowing dreams have always been just blahzay, day-to-day.  The ones you hear about usually are life/death/health, like yours, Margee.  I've heard quite a few other similar accounts.  I haven't had one like it myself.

 

It's been a while since I've recalled a foreshadowing dream, a few years.  The experiences have always been spontaneous, unpredictable, random, like snapshots of meaningless, day-to-day things that make no difference any way - a common denominator which makes them calc out as very likely to be coincidence.  This is why it took a lot of occurrences and quite a few years of experiencing it before I stopped thinking of it as random coincidence.  

[creative]

I'm curious to hear anecdotes from others who have experienced UFOs, ESP, or anything else weird.

 

But in addition I would like to know how you reconcile these experiences with the common theories of reality? (especially materialism)

 

Thanks in advance for any replies. I will start with one of my weird experiences.

 

What this makes me think of is how delusional society actually is.

I mean.

If you believe in an invisible person that lives in the sky and has magical powers and created all and everything, threatens you with eternal torture but loves for wish is not a shred of evidences THEN YOUR NORMAL.

If you believe that aliens might exist or that you saw a ufo THEN YOUR CRAZY or on drugs.

Yeah that makes soooo much send. NOT!

[directionless]

...

It's been a while since I've recalled a foreshadowing dream, a few years.  The experiences have always been spontaneous, unpredictable, random, like snapshots of meaningless, day-to-day things that make no difference any way - a common denominator which makes them calc out as very likely to be coincidence.  This is why it took a lot of occurrences and quite a few years of experiencing it before I stopped thinking of it as random coincidence.

That's how it seems for me too when I have foreshadowing dreams. It could be a simple brain chemistry issue that makes a person think they remember dreaming an incident as they experience it.

 

I think it's important to emphasize to any skeptics that Margee's dream is not like the normal deja vu. She remembered the dream and told somebody about it before it actually came true. Maybe she had rational reasons to think her sister might die and the dream was merely an expression of those worries? Otherwise it is very hard to explain IMO.

 

Also any experience with multiple witnesses (such as Margee's heavenly chimes) is much harder to explain than a single witness. I've read a lot about hallucinations and delusions. People might see or hear something ambiguous and influence each other's understanding of that ambiguous observation, but I've never heard of multiple people hallucinating the same observation from nothing.

[Blake]

I have dreamed of things which would later come true in absolute detail, but they were meaningless things that didn't have any impact on my life. I don't know why that happened.

 

I, also, can sometimes tell when the phone is going to ring. Not sure why. It isn't anything spectacular, lol.

 

The most frequent phenomena that happens with me is dreaming of company before it arrives. Very often I'll dream of a friend, family member or acquaintance coming by the night before they actually do show up. I've even told my wife about it a few times (and my Mom when I still lived at home) that such-and-such is going to show up today and to tell them I'm not home if I don't want to visit with them. I know. I'm terrible.

 

I don't know why any of this happens.

 

Synchonicity, too. There was a period of about 6 months when I was catching the clock at the same exact time, every day, twice a day, without fail. Maybe it was a subconscious queue from my internal clock, or something. A lot of people can will themselves to wake up at a certain time without an alarm clock, so I figure the same hormone responsible for that feature probably has something to do with why that was going on. Again, not sure.

[RankStranger]

I don't dream much

 

But when I do...

 

Holy Fucking Shit you'd better hope they don't come true.

[bornagainathiest]

Does this count as 'weird' enough?

 

(Preamble first, for the sake of context.)

 

In late May this year, our cat Beauty had to be put to sleep after a **** up by our local vet. 

What was supposed to have been a safe, routine procedure turned into a nightmare for her and us, when the wrong drug was administered.  I'll spare you the details - except to say that full responsibility was quickly admitted by the person concerned, that we've been in contact with the AVMA and that we're also taking legal advice about this.   Beauty's condition rapidly worsened and my partner Maureen and I asked for her to be put quickly and painlessly out of her misery that very evening.  That's the context of the dream I experienced that night.  The dream I'll relate to you now.

 

I was in our kitchen, which overlooks our garden.  Everything felt normal and nothing felt out of place. The garden looked as it should have in the month of May - so I wasn't looking out during the spring, fall or winter.  I was standing very close to the window and Beauty jumped up from ground level to the window sill and sat there, looking in at me.  Without a second's hesitation I opened the window and let her come in.  There seemed to be no particular emotion or feeling associated with seeing her... not sadness, not joy, not fear, not anything.  Her wanting to come in and me letting her in just seemed normal and natural.  That's all I can reliably remember.

 

Now, I'd better clarify why I'm calling this dream, 'weird'.

1. This is the first and only dream I've ever had about Beauty.

2. It occurred on the night she was put to sleep.

3. It's not possible for anyone to stand as close as I was to our kitchen windows.  Kitchen units get in the way.

4. It's not possible for her to jump up, the way she did in my dream.  She was 16 and hampered by arthritis.

5. I've never seen her make such a leap.  We acquired her when she 10 and leaping about was something she never did.  So my dream wasn't a memory of her as a young cat.

6. The window sill is far too narrow for her to jump up to and sit on. 

To my mind, the timing and content of this dream definitely qualifies as... weird!

.

.

.

 

Anyway, Directionless asked that we try to explain how we reconcile our weird experiences with common theories of reality... especially materialism.  I think I can do that and I will do so, but first I'd like to relate my partner's take on the dream and then throw this open to everyone else here... so they can offer their interpretations of my dream experience. 

 

Maureen comes from a strongly Catholic, Irish-American background and was raised a good God-fearing gal.  However, by her late teens she was deeply doubtful of the truth of her native religion and these days she is (to all intents and purposes) an atheist.

 

But it's still hard for her to shed the baggage of her uber-religious upbringing and this tendency to slip back into old ways of thinking showed itself quite clearly when I related the dream to her, the following morning.  She surmised that I'd been visited by Beauty's spirit during the night and that our kitty wanted to come back to her home - to be with the family she loved and who loved her.  That's why the resolution of the dream (me letting her in) wasn't colored by any strong emotions on my part.  Things were just returning to their normal state, with Beauty coming home again from the vet... just as she'd done, many times.

 

Now, even though I draw a somewhat different conclusion to Maureen, I don't want to present it just yet. 

Instead, I'd like to ask what you folks think about my dream. 

 

How do you interpret it? 

What are your thoughts about it?

What's your take?

 

Thanks,

 

BAA.

 

 

[par4dcourse]

The emotional part of dreams is what the subc is trying to convey, not the content. Lucid dreaming proves dreams are self originated and controllable.

For most else, I cling to the skeptics mantra: I'll believe it when there's verifiable proof.

[Deva]

bornagainatheist: I can go with Maureen's explanation. As far as the "old ways of thinking" goes, I say you don't need a Catholic Christian background to believe in spirits, that is worldwide and very ancient, probably found in almost all religions. I think you already know that, though.

 

Not all dreams are significant, but the dreamer knows when he/she has one.

[Ro-bear]

The emotional part of dreams is what the subc is trying to convey, not the content. Lucid dreaming proves dreams are self originated and controllable.

For most else, I cling to the skeptics mantra: I'll believe it when there's verifiable proof.

I'm in the same place, Par.  I have had dreams come true, but neither the dream nor the reality that followed was remarkable.

 

I once dreamed that Lloyd Bridges died, and about a week later it happened.  Maybe I had seen a tabloid announcing his "Sad Last Days" in the grocery checkout line and forgotten about it.  Same thing when Reagan died.  But I dreamed about clubbing with Jack Nicholson about ten years ago and that has not happened.  Yet.

[directionless]

I like your wife's interpretation of the dream, but I'm a sentimentalist when it comes to cats.

[pandora]

One of my cats got loose outside for a few days.  I was sleeping in on a Saturday and dreamed I looked out the window in my bedroom to see her in the backyard, desperately yet happily cat-trotting to me.  I woke up, went to the sliding glass doors to the back porch, and there she was, trotting to me just like she was in the dream.  She was hungry, dehydrated, had a fever, had blisters on her paws, and was sooty all over.  I still don't know what happened to her.   I know it was my subconscious worrying about her and wanting her home and coincidence, but it still freaks me out just a bit and it feels good to think kitty loved me so much to send me a dream.

 

Just before my mother died, she was working on a crocheted blanket.  She didn't have it finished when she died and a couple days before, she even mentioned to me how she wanted to finish it (she knew she was going soon).  A few days after she died, I took a close look at the blanket.  It was finished.  She probably finished it and didn't tell me, but at the time it really moved me.  It was very symbolic.

[Voice]

 

...

It's been a while since I've recalled a foreshadowing dream, a few years.  The experiences have always been spontaneous, unpredictable, random, like snapshots of meaningless, day-to-day things that make no difference any way - a common denominator which makes them calc out as very likely to be coincidence.  This is why it took a lot of occurrences and quite a few years of experiencing it before I stopped thinking of it as random coincidence.

That's how it seems for me too when I have foreshadowing dreams. It could be a simple brain chemistry issue that makes a person think they remember dreaming an incident as they experience it.

 

I think it's important to emphasize to any skeptics that Margee's dream is not like the normal deja vu. She remembered the dream and told somebody about it before it actually came true. Maybe she had rational reasons to think her sister might die and the dream was merely an expression of those worries? Otherwise it is very hard to explain IMO.

 

Also any experience with multiple witnesses (such as Margee's heavenly chimes) is much harder to explain than a single witness. I've read a lot about hallucinations and delusions. People might see or hear something ambiguous and influence each other's understanding of that ambiguous observation, but I've never heard of multiple people hallucinating the same observation from nothing.

 

 

I heard of one time when multiple people experienced what they all described as a powerful wind, in a hospital room.  6 people were present.  4 had raving descriptions that did coincide, it was really cool.  A man laid dying on the bed, they said it was his moment of passing.

 

The argument of just thinking you re-experience a dream in a waking state because of the brain chemistry is valid in that people do project the future that way sometimes, among other ways.  And we're not always right.  We like to try.  There's a lot more refinement in understanding this phenomenon, though, which can't be written off by this argument.  

It's more interesting when multiple people have the same dreams; or when you have a dream 7 years prior of things/places/people you couldn't know and then you see it.  

[Voice]

I have dreamed of things which would later come true in absolute detail, but they were meaningless things that didn't have any impact on my life. I don't know why that happened.

 

 

<-- nods

[Voice]

I once dreamed that Lloyd Bridges died, and about a week later it happened.  Maybe I had seen a tabloid announcing his "Sad Last Days" in the grocery checkout line and forgotten about it.  Same thing when Reagan died.  But I dreamed about clubbing with Jack Nicholson about ten years ago and that has not happened.  Yet.

 

It happens this way too.  

[directionless]

One of my cats got loose outside for a few days.  I was sleeping in on a Saturday and dreamed I looked out the window in my bedroom to see her in the backyard, desperately yet happily cat-trotting to me.  I woke up, went to the sliding glass doors to the back porch, and there she was, trotting to me just like she was in the dream.  She was hungry, dehydrated, had a fever, had blisters on her paws, and was sooty all over.  I still don't know what happened to her.   I know it was my subconscious worrying about her and wanting her home and coincidence, but it still freaks me out just a bit and it feels good to think kitty loved me so much to send me a dream.

 

Just before my mother died, she was working on a crocheted blanket.  She didn't have it finished when she died and a couple days before, she even mentioned to me how she wanted to finish it (she knew she was going soon).  A few days after she died, I took a close look at the blanket.  It was finished.  She probably finished it and didn't tell me, but at the time it really moved me.  It was very symbolic.

Thanks for that story - cat telepathy

[directionless]

...

The most frequent phenomena that happens with me is dreaming of company before it arrives. Very often I'll dream of a friend, family member or acquaintance coming by the night before they actually do show up. I've even told my wife about it a few times (and my Mom when I still lived at home) that such-and-such is going to show up today and to tell them I'm not home if I don't want to visit with them. I know. I'm terrible.

...

That sounds like good evidence to me, because you remembered the dream and told somebody else before it came true.

[Geezer]

This is a true story, hell I’m way too old to make stuff up. My wife and I did encounter a UFO. This occurred in July 1968 in rural N/W Indiana. I had recently been discharged from the Navy and went to Indiana to visit my mother and three sisters. I will mention I was a jet engine mechanic in the Navy and therefore familiar with aircraft operations and identifying aircraft during night operations.

 

We had supper with my nephew and his wife in Lafayette. We were heading back to my middle sisters house that was in rural farm country a few miles outside of Lafayette to spend the night with her.

 

It was shortly after midnight and it was pitch black that night. We were the only car on the road. About three miles from my sister’s house I noticed some strange lights off to my left. They were multicolored lights and appeared to be moving in a circular motion. I brought the lights to my wife’s attention and slowed the car down. I rolled the window down to get a better look.

 

The lights were hovering just above the tree tops about a quarter to half mile away. There was an open field between us and the tree line. I brought the car to a stop. The sound of the car’s engine was all that we could hear so I shut the engine off. There was dead silence. I leaned out the window of the car to see if I could hear any sound coming from the rotating lights. There was nothing, no sound whatsoever.

 

I could make out a shadowy outline of a large vehicle/structure that appeared to be circular in shape. The lights began to move slowly towards the direction of my sisters house.  At that point my wife suggested I start the car and get the hell out of there. Actually, she was more like screaming hysterically. I agreed with her suggestion though, and started the car and the put the accelerator to the floor. As we made our hasty exit the lights suddenly went straight up and out of sight in what seemed like a split second.

 

I have no idea what we saw but it definitely wasn’t an aircraft and that’s farm country so it wasn’t swamp gas either. I wouldn’t even offer a guess as to what it was. It fit the definition of a UFO though meaning it was an unidentified object. It was definitely air born. And it certainly appeared to have an intentionally designed form so it met the definition of an object. So, by definition. it was a UFO.

 

What we saw is similar to what millions of others have reported seeing. Never saw anything like it before or after that night.

[directionless]

Thanks for that story, Geezer.

 

That's seems very convincing to me:

- multiple witnesses so it can't be a hallucination

- you saw it several minutes

- it hovered and then moved very fast, so that can't be a helicopter or an airplane - plus there was no sound

- it seemed to respond to your behavior

 

BTW here is a link to something from NICAP listing UFO incidents in 1968. There are two UFO sightings reported in Indiana in July of 1968.

http://www.nicap.org/waves/1968fullrep.htm

[bornagainathiest]

Thanks for the input guys! 

 

What do I think about the dream?

 

Well, I'm kinda divided on the issue - between my heart and my head, my intellect and my emotions.  (Hey!  Perhaps I AM half-Vulcan! )

 

Anyway, on a purely emotional level... of course I'd like it if Beauty's 'spirit' was still with us.  That's a very appealing and comforting idea.  I reckon this is the kind of yearning that the movie 'Ghost' played on.  Those we love go on to an afterlife and are waiting for us to join them, when it's our time.  The emotional pull of this is very strong.

 

But wait! 

 

Intellectually I've come to the conclusion (as an Atheist) that there are no spirits and nothing supernatural in reality.  Therefore, a proper understanding of my dream requires a unbiased analysis.  So I've got to put what I'd love to be true to one side and look only at the facts I know about the workings of the human mind.

 

And so I have to stand with Par4 and Ro-bear on this one.

I know that both Maureen and I felt some irrational guilt over what happened to Beauty.  We talked this out over the following days and weeks.  Ok, neither of us was directly responsible for the mistake - but we were the ones who placed our trust in that vet. 

 

Asking ourselves, "Would this have happened if she'd gone to X instead of Y?" was a fruitless, self-destructive train of thought, but we both found ourselves returning to it, time and again.  We knew that it was a mistake to do so, but we just couldn't help ourselves.  You folks can relate to that, I'm sure.  So, I think that this unfounded guilt somehow found it's way into my subconscious and that the dream was my way of dealing with it.

 

The dream was an un-doing and un-making of all the trouble and pain of that day.  It was a simple rectification of Beauty's loss by admitting her back into the house as if nothing had happened.  Hence the lack of emotional content.  I was subconsciously turning back the clock to a time when everything was normal and at peace.  The status quo was restored.

 

Therefore, I don't feel I need to invoke supernatural and/or spiritual things to explain my dream about Beauty.

What I experienced was just the subconscious workings of my mind as it dealt with the emotional trauma of that day.

.

.

.

Btw, my thanks to Directionless too!

For starting up this thread, that is.  

 

 

BAA

 

 

 

[directionless]

Thanks, BAA.

 

Here is ESP experience. Hopefully others will continue to share their weird experiences.

 

In 7th grade our teacher decided to test everybody for ESP. (I suppose a teacher would be fired for doing something like that today, but this was in the late 70s.) So she visualized something on the bulletin board and everybody had to guess what she visualized.

 

I was the only person to guess right. But here is the weird part: I just knew the answer with complete certainty and without even trying. I was the last person in the class to guess, and I remember worrying that nobody else might guess the right answer before I could say it. But I never doubted that I had the right answer. The teacher seemed very surprised - probably by my confidence more than anything else.

 

Of course there are lots of explanations besides ESP, but it seemed weird.

[Voice]

The only time I saw a UFO, it wasn't a UFO, it was an unregistered blimp.  I'm not sure what to make of UFO phenomenon.  If you go by accounts, there are definitely some things that need explaining.  If you go by social status and credibility, there are no UFO's.

 

I like to speculate.  It's terrifying to think there could be beings like that, and mathematically (Carl Sagan did all the calcs) it's probable that higher life forms travel stars.  Hell, we have higher life forms (more advanced and adaptive than us) on Earth but we're too arrogant to acknowledge it.  

Anyway, doesn't everyone know that aliens are just humans returning from the future?  The White House colony ended up being the evil ones.

[directionless]

The only time I saw a UFO, it wasn't a UFO, it was an unregistered blimp.  I'm not sure what to make of UFO phenomenon.  If you go by accounts, there are definitely some things that need explaining.  If you go by social status and credibility, there are no UFO's.

 

I like to speculate.  It's terrifying to think there could be beings like that, and mathematically (Carl Sagan did all the calcs) it's probable that higher life forms travel stars.  Hell, we have higher life forms (more advanced and adaptive than us) on Earth but we're too arrogant to acknowledge it.  

Anyway, doesn't everyone know that aliens are just humans returning from the future?  The White House colony ended up being the evil ones.

The most common UFO misidentification IMO is Chinese lanterns. I used to read the MUFON latest reports every morning and about half of them were orange lights moving slowly across the sky. But there were always a couple of more interesting reports too. Geezer's UFO report in this thread is hard to explain as anything but secret earth technology, alien technology, or paranormal IMO. So why do so many people cling to their skeptical model when there are so many anomalous experiences that don't fit that model?

 

Here is a link to an article about the scientist who won the 1993 Nobel prize in chemistry for reproducing DNA fragments. He was abducted by a "glowing raccoon" at his cabin. (Sounds ridiculous but his daughter and a neighbor independently reported similar experiences at the cabin.) Here is a quote from the Dr. Kary Mullis:

In his own book Mullis concluded, “I wouldn’t try to publish a scientific paper about these things, because I can’t do any experiments. I can’t make glowing raccoons appear. I can’t buy them from a scientific supply house to study. I can’t cause myself to be lost again for several hours. But I don’t deny what happened. It’s what science calls anecdotal, because it only happened in a way that you can’t reproduce. But it happened.”

http://www.cufos.org/IUR_spring99_addendum.html